Great news, thank for the heads up - missed this at the festivals (might still get a couple of chances though, but will still probably want to own it). It's been a while since the last English-friendly Garrel DVD (AE's Les amants réguliers?)... wish someone would put out Un été brûlant as well

From the trailer of L'astragale it seems Garrel's ex-wife Brigitte Sy may have picked up a few traits from him for her own film. Anyone has seen any of her directing efforts to offer a more substantial assessment?

Anyone see this? It's playing at the NYFF, but I haven't been able to make time for it.

I barely have any familiarity with Garrel, but with Metrograph's retrospective just beginning, I'll have to make time to see something - I've been told most of these films aren't easily available in the U.S. (much less in good quality).

Anyone see this? It's playing at the NYFF, but I haven't been able to make time for it.

I saw it this past May in Paris with Philippe and Esther Garrel doing a talk/Q&A afterwards - I think Louis Garrel was there too but didn't come up on stage (I didn't see him, but Philippe mentioned he was around). The Q&A was great - someone asked Garrel about financing his recent films, and he started off on a long explanation about the 2008 financial crisis, saying it's why he makes shorter films now, doing only a few takes per scene after rehearsing extensively with the actors for months ahead of time. I don't remember the exact figures, but his shooting ratio is amazingly close to 1:1 in terms of what we see on screen. There are essentially no deleted sequences; he shoots only exactly what he needs, and then assembles the film from his preferred takes within a short post-production period. He brought up Godard in some fashion or another in the course of answering pretty much every question - a constant reference point.

Personally I didn't feel the film stood out very much in the context of Garrel's overall body of work. It's a chamber drama (humorous at times as well) with some good performances, but rather subdued stylistically (although just the baseline of black-and-white 35mm is always pleasant to look at). It's a perfectly watchable film and maybe one I would appreciate more a second time through with my expectations properly calibrated - but I wouldn't think of showing it to anyone as an introduction to his work and why it matters. For that you could start with something like Les amants reguliers (easy enough to get hold of, I would think) but I am personally partial to films like Elle a passé tant d'heures sous les sunlights and Liberté, la nuit which are unfortunately quite a bit more rare.

My favorite works are the ones where he blends his experimental and narrative modes with a heavy autobiographical/home movie bent, transforming them into something utterly unlike anything else in cinema. Sometimes there are passages with no music or sound whatsoever, just a close portrait of a character, which of course becomes a portrait of the actor as well, like Warhol's screen tests. Images sometimes appear seemingly out of any kind of narrative/aesthetic context - glimpses, fragments of something extremely personal and interior that may only be understood by Garrel himself, yet the emotional weight invested in them somehow comes across. Deep melancholy infuses every moment, and you really can sense that for him there is no line whatsoever between his life and his films, he is able to put it all on the screen and evoke all the myriad nuances of depression and grief.

More recently his films have taken on a more 'craftsmanlike' approach - he seems to be in much better spirits, teaching his young acting students and casting many of them in his films. His recent approach to screenwriting, making a point of using men and women to author dialogue within a single script, is certainly commendable and does yield a genuine incisiveness to the dialogues. I just find that, on the whole, the recent trilogy of films rarely reach the same dizzying heights for me. Even the somewhat uneven later films like La frontière de l'aube or Un été brûlant have unforgettable sequences. Still very much a Garrel fan, of course, and wouldn't want him making the same films forever anyway.

What did you think of Les Hautes solitudes? Mubi was playing three films of his, and while I rather liked the other two I found that was incredibly hard to get into. Like James Benning's Shadows, I found it an interesting experiment theoretically, but not engaging as an actual movie.What would you say his best film is? Regular Lovers and his early Nico starring experiment are the ones who got my attention (I'm a sucker for any May 68 films)